"But surely to give a dying baby food… is not just a question of logic."
Those words have haunted John since he first heard them that night at his mother's dinner party. He knew it was his Christian duty to help those less fortunate. His mother had drilled Christian values into him since he was a boy. He had even been one of the less fortunate himself for a time. His family had always given at church to help aid the poor and he tried to provide his workers with the best possible wages he could. His were the highest paid workers in Milton. But what Margaret did with her baskets was more direct, more personal. John took her words as a challenge – how could he help like she did.
It was not proper for a man to bring baskets of provisions to the poor so that was out of the question. Margaret even went so far as to deliver the baskets all by herself. She would often travel alone into the Princeton District, where many of his own workers lived, to visit the friends she had made there and bring them some tangible form of aid. While it was more acceptable for a man to travel alone into such areas of town, as a Master it would be rather awkward and certainly quite unconventional to befriend his workers and visit them in their homes. He would have to set that idea aside. Maybe if such an opportunity presented itself…
So what was acceptable for a gentleman to do to directly aid those less fortunate than himself? Well it would certainly be acceptable for him to give them money. There, that was an idea! He could make sure he always had a ready supply of coins in his pocket to distribute whenever an opportunity presented itself.
While he still believed that it was the duty of any man to work hard to raise himself out of unfortunate circumstances, he could now see from Margaret's point of view that giving them a little help every now and then might give them a leg up to help themselves. Now he knew that it was the inherent nature of Northerners to be adverse to charity so he might have to be a little creative. Children, he knew, would be easier to give coins to. What they did with it would then be out of his hands, but he would have done his duty. Would Margaret be proud of him? He hoped so, but would she ever know?
So now, every time John went out somewhere, he was certain to have coins in his pocket. If there was a beggar on the street corner he would drop a few coins in his cup. When he spied an old, bedraggled woman at the fruit stand he might surreptitiously drop some coins into her basket for her to find later. Once an old man inadvertently dropped his coin purse on the ground, spilling its meager contents. John stooped to help him gather his money and clandestinely added a handful of his own to it. The man gave John a surprised expression when he found the purse weighed more than twice as much as it did when he dropped it.
This became such a habit for John that he did it wherever he went. Whether he was in Liverpool, London, or even Le Harve, John would find opportunities to slip his coins into the hands, or pockets (he was a put-pocket as opposed to a pick-pocket), or baskets of those less fortunate than himself. So when he found, on this most recent trip to London, that he had some extra time between his meeting with Mr. Lennox and the dinner at Harley Street, John decided to take a walk into some of the city's less savory districts. Even though he was here to give up his lease and his life's work had ended in failure he still could not resist this newfound desire to give. He also thought the exercise might help calm his nerves before he saw Margaret again that evening. In a way, this charitable work always made him feel a little bit closer to her in spirit.